Nearly 600 participants logged onto our webinar yesterday demonstrating a key component of our comprehensive reforms to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the FCC’s Lifeline program: the National Lifeline Accountability Database. The database will ensure compliance with one of our most important rules to protect the integrity of the program: limiting Lifeline benefits to one subscription per household. By harnessing communications and information technology to enforce this rule, the Commission will protect the universal service fund and the consumers who pay into it, promote fairness to beneficiaries and companies who play by the rules, and reduce the burden on providers.
My colleagues at the FCC, along with representatives from the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) and the database vendor, shared information about the database and answered questions to ensure that Lifeline providers, states, consumers and others users can hit the ground running once the database is online. We will conduct training workshops and additional outreach to ensure all interested parties are prepared for the database.
Implementation of the database will begin in Arkansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma and Washington this fall, with other states to follow shortly thereafter. Importantly, USAC will “scrub” the subscriber information to eliminate duplicates BEFORE loading it into the database. The database will be operational by the end of the year and going forward will permanently detect and prevent duplicative Lifeline support before a consumer enrolls in the Lifeline program.
We’re not sitting idle waiting for the database to be implemented: USAC will continue with its targeted data reviews across the states that root out duplicate Lifeline support. USAC began these reviews at the FCC’s urging two years ago and has eliminated nearly 1.7 million duplicate subscriptions producing approximately $200 million in annualized savings to the Universal Service Fund.